


The PR Consultant

by ultimaromanorum



Category: The Second Crimean War
Genre: (and to anyone else foolishly considering a career in arms supply chain field research), (this is a cautionary tale from the author to the author), Gen, mad political science, practical aesthetics for Cossacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-06
Updated: 2017-06-07
Packaged: 2018-10-15 03:11:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10549090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ultimaromanorum/pseuds/ultimaromanorum
Summary: This was only supposed to be one part, but it got out of hand as I continued to argue with Bohdan in my head as a kind of proxy for all the world's ethnonationalists.





	1. Chapter 1

“Hetman?” The sentry was looming in the door, hat balled up in one hand, brows knitted sheepishly. “Sorry to trouble you this early, but—”

“Yes?”

“Patrol just picked up a weird American trying to get out of town on the quiet. We thought maybe you should see this one. The commander's already got her out in the other room.”

“What makes you say it’s an American?”

“Flag pin.”

“Weird how?” Bohdan hitched his rifle sling onto his shoulder and reached for the chipped mug on the floor.

“You’d better come see.”

He drained the last of his coffee as he followed the sentry out into the main room. Anastasiya was standing at a rickety table strewn with maps and thermoses, clutching the handle of a grimy army surplus backpack with an Eye of Providence crudely stamped onto the flap in fading crimson paint. Beside it on the table was an old but well-maintained camera with a brightly embroidered strap. She nodded towards corner beside the south window, where a woman in rumpled civilian clothes under an old fatigue jacket was leaning against the wall with her eyes closed, her hands zip-tied behind her.

“Go on back outside, Oleksiy.”

The sentry saluted and slipped out the front door. When it had closed, Bohdan leaned the rifle against the edge of the table and stepped forward to inspect the prisoner. Her tangled mouse-brown hair was pulled back carelessly with an asparagus rubberband, her jeans were grass-stained at the knees, and on the collar of her old jungle camo jacket was a tiny enameled pin depicting crossed American and Ukrainian flags. Someone had already taken away her bootlaces.

“Well?”

The American’s eyes snapped open. “You sons of bitches don’t even wear red boots. What's the point, if you don’t get to wear red boots?”

Bohdan lowered his empty mug and stared. Anastasiya had unzipped the backpack and was lining up canisters of instant slide film and carefully rolled-up clothes on the table.

“I’m not calling you Hetman, either, not until you display the integrity to commit to the red boots and the hairdo. I get your reluctance: the hairdo is heinous. But that’s no excuse.”

“What?” he said carefully.

“No. Red. Boots. C’mon man. This neo-Cossack movement is a disgrace. For a self-styled romantic nationalist, you’re insufficiently committed to your aesthetic. I’m embarrassed for you. I mean good god. You’re wearing a t-shirt.”

Bohdan glanced down at his white t-shirt and then round the room at the table and benches, a dilapidated wood stove, a pile of packs heaped up in a corner. The walls were bare except for a shelf that must once have held an icon. “Sorry to disappoint,” he said mildly.

"There's a guy in that Ilya Repin painting wearing a long plain white coat. You could start there."

"That's right, there is—"

“I am confident, however, that some of you must do the hopak at least occasionally.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, you know what they say, nationalism starts with folk dancing—”

“Sorry?” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Anastasiya open what should have been the water bottle pocket and take out a mangled 45mm artillery shell.

“— and ends with barbed wire.”

“What.”

“Never mind. Listen, I’ve read _Taras Bulba_ , and this is no way for good Cossacks to behave. I don’t see any evidence of carousing. You have no horses. There don’t seem to be any shashkas besides the ones on your insignia. I strongly suspect you of disliking fun.”

“It’s 1996.”

“I’m aware. What sort of an excuse is that?”

“Tell me, do you wear a three-cornered hat?”

“Sure, but only for patriotic holidays. Then again I also don’t purport to be the leader of a nationalist revivalist movement, do I?”

“Do you? It seems to me you guys could do with some national renewal yourselves.”

The American snorted. “Are you kidding me? We chucked out the British because we didn’t like the tax brackets and only became Americans much later. I mean until the late 1800s you couldn’t put a Virginian and a New Yorker in the same room together without hostilities breaking out. In fact about the only thing capable of uniting the American polity is our universal hatred for the tax man. Anyway I’m not going to put up with this kind of whataboutist sidetracking. Do you know how to brew mead? Mead is nasty, don't get me wrong, but it's also an integral part of the schtick.”

Bohdan rubbed an eye with the heel of his hand. “I think we’ve got someone who can play the bandura.”

“That’s good. That’s a start. We can work with that. I realize this is probably a long shot but do you by any chance know how to use a shashka?”

“It’s 1996!”

“Do you even— oh my god, you don’t actually own a sword, do you?”

“No.” Bohdan was looking back over his shoulder at the table, now strewn in carefully-labelled quart freezer bags of spent brass. “What’s your name?”

“Elizabeth Rouka.”

Anastasiya shook her head. “No papers in the pack.” She held up a topographic map with multicolored symbols inked on it. “Just this map. Hang on.”

The American flattened herself against the wall as her jacket and front pockets were searched, and let out a startled gasp when Anastasiya grabbed her hard by the shoulder and slammed her into the bricks as she spun her round to check her back. Something clattered into Bohdan’s mug as Anastasiya stepped back to stand beside him. He looked down. In a sticky film of coffee at the bottom were a three live Kalashnikov rounds.

“So, American with no papers and many opinions,” said Anastasiya as she opened a film canister and started to unspool the roll of slides, “what are you doing behind our lines?”

“Wasn't behind your lines when I got here. My name’s Elizabeth Rouka, like I said.” When she turned back towards them, there was a red scrape on her cheek. “I’m from Washington DC, and, for my sins, I study arms supply chains. Your arms supply chains, if you must know. Aside from all the graft, the government’s are reasonably transparent. May I sit down?”

“No. For whom?”

Anastasiya passed Bohdan the slides. He held the roll up to the light, and saw a jumble of small arms, exploded ordnance, and bombed-out vehicles, punctuated by the occasional road sign or municipal building.

“Anyone who subscribes to the Armament Research Center’s quarterly report.”

“Where is it published?”

“The English edition is published in DC and there’s a French version out of Beirut. Are you going to write any of this down?”

“No. Did you have a guide?”

“The little bastard ditched me yesterday afternoon when you lot rolled in.”

“Was he Russian?”

“I didn’t take a DNA sample.”

“Where did you learn Ukrainian?”

“University.”

“Hm. Where’s your passport?”

“In a safe in Kiev. You didn’t find the photocopy in the pack?”

“No. I didn’t.”

There was a long silence.

The American closed her eyes again and rested her head against the wall. After a moment she smiled slightly. “Try proving I’m not a camel?”

“Try proving you’re not a camel.”


	2. Chapter 2

The American was sitting on the floor in the corner, as if she had slowly slid down the wall without moving her feet.Bohdan too had slid downward in his seat until he was all bunched up on the edge with his head halfway down the chair back.The American was still talking.

“That’s backwards,” she was saying.“You get nationality from political unity, not the other way round.”

“And where do you get political unity?”

“We’ve been over this.Either you fight your local empire or you fight the tax man.”

“Do you want me to march into Moscow and fight Yeltsin personally?”

The American sighed.“I wouldn’t exactly complain, or you could have tried something economic instead of starting an insurgency in your own country, but that ship has sailed.Contra the Radio Yerevan joke, trying to go to space might have worked too.The trick is finding some kind of national project that appeals to everyone inside your border.What exactly do you want, anyway?You do realize that once you’ve killed or driven out the Russians and the Tatars and all the Ukrainians who think you’re a terrorist, and created your pure Cossack ethnostate, you’re still stuck governing people, right?You have factored that in, I hope.It’s going to go just like governing people always does.”

“What do you recommend?”

“Red boots and not being a terrorist.But I’m not a political scientist, I just know where bullets come from.”

Bohdan leaned forward.“So where do bullets come from?”

“I’ll tell you, but first I want to know where you’ve been getting the pins.”

“Pins?”

The American rolled her eyes.“Yeah, the pins.On your hats.”

Bohdan reached towards his head absently.“Oh.I bought them in bulk when we were just starting out.”

“Right.And you’ve never had to buy more?”

“Bulk order, like I said.What about the bullets?”

“In the abstract, from the total depravity of man, but in more mundane terms most of yours seem to ultimately come from Russia, either straight from the stockpiles here or through some truly convoluted supply chains.Not that that means anything, necessarily.The damn things get around.”

Bohdan sat back in his chair with a look on his face like someone suddenly discovering a bad molar.

“Some of it’s from Bulgaria, some of it’s from Poland, some could start in China but it’s always hard to tell with them.Look, don’t overinterpret it.It’s sort of inevitable when you’re overwhelmingly using Soviet weapons, and it figures that if your middleman buys his ammo from Russian-backed thugs in, say, the former Yugoslavia to sell to anti-Russian thugs in Ukraine, it doesn’t mean anything political.The Russians don’t care where it all ends up, being thugs themselves, as long as enough of it gets through.The markup’s gotta be heinous, but I don’t know anything about that, I just took pictures for the analysts.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

The American shrugged.“Because it doesn’t matter if you know?”

“Fair enough.I suppose it’s only fair to shoot it back at them.”

“Are you serious?It’s not like your Russophone neighbor is shipping crates of mortar shells to the Serbs or anybody else— although you probably like Republika Srpska.You might as well say Canadians are responsible for US arms sales to Saudi Arabia.”

“It’s symbolic.”

“It sure is.”

“What does the pin mean?”

“What?”

“The pin on your collar.What does it mean?”

The American looked down out of the corner of her eye at the little enameled flags.Outside, footsteps thudded up the front steps.“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I never gave it that much thought.I pay taxes in both countries, maybe?I hate everything you and the Russians stand for and I want Ukraine to become a US-style constitutional democracy, and also infinite wishes and a pony?I don’t know.It’s just a pin.”

Anastasiya shut the front door quietly behind her.

“Why does it have to mean anything?”

“That’s enough philosophizing.”Anastasiya grabbed the American by her jacket collar and hauled her to her feet.“You don’t have a tent, so where were you staying?”

“I’m not going to tell you that.”

Anastasiya slapped her hard across the face.She stumbled, fell heavily on one knee, and was hauled to her feet again.Anastasiya drew her hand back a second time.The American turned her head away. 

“I said I’m not going to tell you.I know what’s going to happen to me.I’m not going to drag anybody else into it.”

“We’ll find out anyway.”

“But you won’t find out from me.You didn’t find my guide.”

“We didn’t.”

The American swayed a little as she tried to wrench her bound hands into a more comfortable position.“Good.”

“For him, yes.”

“I believe her,” said Bohdan suddenly.“I think she’s exactly what she says.”

“I don’t, but it doesn’t matter now that’s she’s seen our operation from the inside.”

“No.It doesn’t.”

The American glanced over at Bohdan, whose head was tilted as if watching a zoological specimen in a glass case, and then back at Anastasiya.“I’d always figured I’d step on a land mine someday—” She took a deep, shuddering breath.“Not in the back of the head, please?”


	3. Chapter 3

Outside the ground was muddy, and the American struggled to keep her unlaced boots on her feet as Oleksiy pushed her down the back steps, past Bohdan and Anastasiya where they sat on the edge of the well cover, and across the garden towards a clear spot under a gnarled linden just starting to come out in pale green leaves.A small knot of Shashka soldiers had started to accumulate around the back door of the house.

“Do you want to do it, or should I?”

Bohdan shrugged.

Anastasiya stood up.“I will, then.”

She strolled over towards the linden.Oleksiy had settled into a sloppy parade rest beside the American, who seemed to be riveted by the sparse blossoms of a swollen, twisty cherry tree that stood beside the house.Anastasiya stepped in front of her. 

“I also sent someone to ask round town first to see if we could get a sabre.”

The American said nothing, but her breath caught and her chin lifted slightly.

“We didn’t find one.”

Anastasiya unclipped the pin from the American’s jacket and slid it carefully with its fastener into her pocket, then ran a hand inside her shirt collar and brought out a small medallion on a chain.As Anastasiya’s fingers grazed her throat, the American went deadly pale.The chain broke with a sharp tug.

“Does she have rings or bracelets?”

Oleksiy shook his head.

Anastasiya turned back to the American, who was staring straight through her as if still looking at the cherry tree.“Are you done talking?”

“Yes.”

Oleksiy gave the American a shove and stepped back.She collapsed kneeling in the patchy new grass, and for a moment she continued to stare straight ahead before slowly raising her head to look Anastasiya in the eye.Anastasiya drew her sidearm and racked the slide.


End file.
